His royal thoughts require many a stair, Many a tower, many an outlook fair, Of which I have no thought, and need no care.
Where I am most perplexed, it may be there Thou mak'st a secret chamber, holy-dim, Where thou wilt come to help my deepest prayer.
17.
I cannot tell why this day I am ill;
But I am well because it is thy will--Which is to make me pure and right like thee.
Not yet I need escape--'tis bearable Because thou knowest. And when harder things Shall rise and gather, and overshadow me, I shall have comfort in thy strengthenings.
18.
How do I live when thou art far away?--When I am sunk, and lost, and dead in sleep, Or in some dream with no sense in its play?
When weary-dull, or drowned in study deep?--O Lord, I live so utterly on thee, I live when I forget thee utterly--Not that thou thinkest of, but thinkest me.
19.
Thou far!--that word the holy truth doth blur.
Doth the great ocean from the small fish run When it sleeps fast in its low weedy bower?
Is the sun far from any smallest flower, That lives by his dear presence every hour?
Are they not one in oneness without stir--The flower the flower because the sun the sun?
20.
"Dear presence every hour"!--what of the night, When crumpled daisies shut gold sadness in;
And some do hang the head for lack of light, Sick almost unto death with absence-blight?--Thy memory then, warm-lingering in the ground, Mourned dewy in the air, keeps their hearts sound, Till fresh with day their lapsed life begin.
21.
All things are shadows of the shining true:
Sun, sea, and air--close, potent, hurtless fire--Flowers from their mother's prison--dove, and dew--Every thing holds a slender guiding clue Back to the mighty oneness:--hearts of faith Know thee than light, than heat, endlessly nigher, Our life's life, carpenter of Nazareth.
22.
Sometimes, perhaps, the spiritual blood runs slow, And soft along the veins of will doth flow, Seeking God's arteries from which it came.
Or does the etherial, creative flame Turn back upon itself, and latent grow?--It matters not what figure or what name, If thou art in me, and I am not to blame.
23.
In such God-silence, the soul's nest, so long As all is still, no flutter and no song, Is safe. But if my soul begin to act Without some waking to the eternal fact That my dear life is hid with Christ in God--I think and move a creature of earth's clod, Stand on the finite, act upon the wrong.
24.
My soul this sermon hence for itself prepares:--"Then is there nothing vile thou mayst not do, Buffeted in a tumult of low cares, And treacheries of the old man 'gainst the new."--Lord, in my spirit let thy spirit move, Warning, that it may not have to reprove:--In my dead moments, master, stir the prayers.
25.
Lord, let my soul o'erburdened then feel thee Thrilling through all its brain's stupidity.
If I must slumber, heedless of ill harms, Let it not be but in my Father's arms;
Outside the shelter of his garment's fold, All is a waste, a terror-haunted wold.--Lord, keep me. 'Tis thy child that cries. Behold.
26.
Some say that thou their endless love host won By deeds for them which I may not believe Thou ever didst, or ever willedst done:
What matter, so they love thee? They receive Eternal more than the poor loom and wheel Of their invention ever wove and spun.--I love thee for I must, thine all from head to heel.
27.
The love of thee will set all notions right.
Right save by love no thought can be or may;
Only love's knowledge is the primal light.
Questions keep camp along love's shining coast--Challenge my love and would my entrance stay:
Across the buzzing, doubting, challenging host, I rush to thee, and cling, and cry--Thou know'st.
28.
Oh, let me live in thy realities, Nor substitute my notions for thy facts, Notion with notion making leagues and pacts;
They are to truth but as dream-deeds to acts, And questioned, make me doubt of everything.--"O Lord, my God," my heart gets up and cries, "Come thy own self, and with thee my faith bring."
29.
O master, my desires to work, to know, To be aware that I do live and grow--All restless wish for anything not thee, I yield, and on thy altar offer me.
Let me no more from out thy presence go, But keep me waiting watchful for thy will--Even while I do it, waiting watchful still.
30.
Thou art the Lord of life, the secret thing.
Thou wilt give endless more than I could find, Even if without thee I could go and seek;
For thou art one, Christ, with my deepest mind, Duty alive, self-willed, in me dost speak, And to a deeper purer being sting:
I come to thee, my life, my causing kind.
31.
Nothing is alien in thy world immense--No look of sky or earth or man or beast;
"In the great hand of God I stand, and thence"
Look out on life, his endless, holy feast.
To try to feel is but to court despair, To dig for a sun within a garden-fence:
Who does thy will, O God, he lives upon thy air.
